Typically, policy makers don’t define literacy as a source of empowerment. After all, why would they? Why would slave masters teach slaves to read and be free? There’s a reason they don’t teach real history in K-12 schools in the United States. There’s a reason why poor folks pay higher taxes and rich folks get tax cuts.
If the powers that be were to teach the peons of society, that we are in fact not peons, but are pawns capable to take on the king and queen, there would be a major threat to the status quo. If kids whose families lived from one welfare check to the next, knew why their mom was killed by a police officer, and why their dad was unable to go to college… perhaps they would question their role in society, and what is already expected and assumed of them for the remainder of their lives.
Literacy isn’t about reading and writing. Literacy is about understanding your place in society. Is it about understanding who wrote those definitions of literacy, poverty, inner city, ethnic, and at risk. It is understanding why you were stamped with these labels and why you are supposed to stay on the bottom and stay quiet. Literacy is learning how the system that has defined you works. The insides and outsides, the upsides and downsides, the good, the bad, and the treacherous. Literacy is something that the policy makers, the elites, fear they will no longer control. They use literacy as a false sense of attainment and achievement to keep people where they are.
Literacy should challenge the status quo. Literacy should eat the status quo, and spit out a new structure. Literacy should empower people, to communicate with each other, to stop fearing the institution, and instead challenge and dismantle the structure, piece by piece. Literacy should be a tool, which can be shared with neighbors and partners and enemies, to solidify commonalities and work together towards creating a more equal relationship between the peons and the policy makers, between the pawns and the kings and queens. After all, the pawns can’t overthrow the king and queen unless they are literate. And the pawns won’t become literate (in any useful way) by being held back by the definitions of literacy and accessibility of empowering information.
In order for literacy to mean anything other than a protection of the educated upper class, pawns and peons must unite and demand the term be put into a useful meaning, and learn to work together to begin to challenge the powers that be.